From: Damien Broderick (damienb@unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Thu May 15 2003 - 23:16:06 MDT
At 09:22 AM 5/15/03 +0200, Anders wrote:
>The way to go is of course to
>drill down using a diamondoid self-replicating structure with
>active cooling powered by the thermal differential!
That's a... cool... approach, but really the elegant way to do it is to
drop a cosmic string down through one of the poles. I seem to recall Greg
Benford doing this in one of his Galactic Center novels.
Incidentally, Adrian suggested that `science fiction' was coined in the
19th century. Here's the skinny:
< Sf historian Brian Stableford asserts that the earliest use of the
expression is found in one William Wilson's A Little Earnest Book Upon a
Great Old Subject (1851), in which, discussing `the Poetry of Science', he
defined Science Fiction as a kind of literature `in which the revealed
truths of science may be given, interwoven with a pleasing story which may
itself be poetical and true - thus circulating a knowledge of the Poetry of
Science, clothed in a garb of the Poetry of Life.'
This can be seen, though, as merely an elaboration of the project glimpsed
prophetically half a century earlier by Wordsworth in his Preface to the
second edition of Lyrical Ballads: `The remotest discoveries of the
Chemist, the Botanist, or the Mineralogist, will be as proper objects of
the Poet's art as any upon which it can be employed, if the time should
ever come when these things shall be familiar to us... as enjoying and
suffering beings.' >
READING BY STARLIGHT, by you know who
Damien Broderick
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu May 15 2003 - 23:26:29 MDT